The Pop Art artist and longtime Roman Catholic nun Corita Kent helps us to cultivate “an understanding heart,” as Solomon asks for in today’s first reading. Her artwork plays with everyday words and images, probing them for spiritual meaning and reconfiguring them into joyful affirmations of life. In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us, as he often does, that “the kingdom of heaven is like…,” using simple and earthy metaphors to convey his message. Corita, whose name can be translated from Latin as “little heart,” also gives us ways to become more aware, more understanding, of how the sacred sustains us through the people, places, and things all around us.

Corita had been making art professionally for about a decade when she encountered Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in Los Angeles. She was transformed by the experience, and she remarked that “coming home, you saw everything like Andy Warhol.” Shortly thereafter, she began to make Pop Art silkscreens, appropriating branding from Wonderbread, using its bright colors and optimistic slogans to help think more deeply about Catholicism’s own special bread, the Eucharist. In another serigraph, Corita splashed pastel colors across her screen along with the signature script “G” logo of General Mills. Not content merely to remind us of our love for cereal, she added the words “The Big G Stands for Goodness,” calling our attention to the ways that the simple good things we see daily can inspire us toward greater awareness of the divine presence which is everywhere. In her collection Footnotes and Headlines: A Play-Pray Book, she once wrote that “there are three things that keep life from being so daily: To make love, to make believe, to make hope with the ordinary everyday people and stuff around us.” Corita’s art can teach us how to nurture this talent in our own life. 

Solomon asks God for a heart to judge and to distinguish right from wrong. While much of Corita’s art is joyful, she was deeply concerned, too, about the important issues of her day. Throughout the 1960s, she stayed in touch with the causes which defined the decade. Many of her prints are, as one of them proclaims, “uncommon advertising for the common good.” She made work dealing with subjects like hunger, the war in Vietnam, and the Watts uprising. She commemorated figures like Cesar Chavez, and her work mourned the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. One print showcases the actions of her good friend Daniel Berrigan as part of the Catonsville Nine. Her own involvement was very different, however. In an interview with Bernard Glam she once said “I think I really had no guts at all, until it finally occurred to me that I really had my own place” in the work of justice. “I couldn’t march and be in the public that way,” she continued, but she hoped that her art could be “a way to help awaken people to something they may not be aware of, rather than enclosing it in a book or making a speech about it.” We cannot all go to jail so often as Daniel Berrigan did, but we can all find our own ways to “get with the action,” as Corita liked to say. 

Corita Kent, for many years a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, was born Frances Kent and known variously as Sr. Mary Corita, Sr. Corita, and Ms. Corita Kent over the course of her life. She was born in Iowa in 1918, raised in Los Angeles, left religious life and moved to Boston in 1968, and lived there until her death in 1986. Upon her departure from the convent, one writer called her “the best known religious in the United States and the walking symbol of the ‘new nun.’” Her artwork can be found in the collections of dozens of museums around the world, or alongside Interstate 93 in Boston, where her “rainbow swash” adorns a commercial gas tank and stands as the largest copyrighted work of art in the world. You can find more information about her at corita.org.

Corita once wrote that “Today we find all the superlatives and the infinite fulfillment [humanity] hungers for portrayed not only in fairy stories or poems but also in billboards and magazine ads and tv commercials.” She continues that “Nobody should believe ads and billboards. They are contemporary fairy tales and the carriers, as fairy tales have always been, of [humanity’s] loves and hopes and beliefs.” Many advertisements are, for her, “almost like contemporary translations of the psalms for us to be singing on our way.” “Thank God for cityscapes,” she declares, “They have signs. Thank God for magazines—they have ads.” 

We invite you to think back to advertisements, signs, and other media which have grabbed your attention recently, and as you move forward through your day. What hopeful messages do you find there? What infinite desires are channeled through these media, and what does this help you understand about humanity’s relationship to God? What longings are found there? What of your own deepest wants are echoed? And how can you help others realize these hopes for themselves? As Corita reminds us, we should see these ads “as a kind of communication from [our] fellow [human beings].” If we can remember that very little of what we read in ads is literally true, we can live “with a great kind of freedom, freed from pressures to want or buy.” We can thereby “take the whole business on a fairy story or allegorical level and enjoy it immensely.” 

Corita Kent believed in the power of joy throughout her life, even when it was not always easy. She was known as one of the most dutiful members of her religious community, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, always making time for her fellow sisters and giving advice about difficulties in community life or in difficult professional assignments. However, beginning in the mid-1950s, her community was often a target of scrutiny by the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal James Francis McIntyre. He criticized the order and made Corita’s artwork a special target. Nonetheless, she continued to share her joy with others by channeling it into her work, helping others to develop understanding hearts through her teaching, art, and activism. 

By 1968, as she said, after years of conflict with the archdiocese and a demanding schedule of teaching and speaking engagements “it had all become too much.” Corita decided to leave her religious order and the Catholic Church. She moved to Boston and continued her career as an artist until her death in 1986. Even beyond the formal boundaries of the church, Corita continued to “remain open to mystery,” and worked to develop real and authentic connections with others through her art. Much like Jesus’s invitation to look for the kingdom in seemingly unlikely places, Corita placed trust in her own discernment and worked to continue her mission in a new form of life, wherever it took her. 

The Immaculate Heart Community bills itself as “an ecumenical Christian community without walls, committed to the foundations of our work: faith, hope, action.” They work “toward peace and justice for all people, with a focus on the arts, women, immigration and environment.” Founded in 1970, the community came about when hundreds of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary requested formal dispensation from their religious vows. After years of experimentation with the forms and structures of their communal religious life following the Vatican II call for the reform of religious life, the sisters found themselves unable to agree with their archbishop on what changes were acceptable, and many chose to follow their conscience and leave formal religious life. Today, the Immaculate Heart Community carries on their work, in ministries such as Casa Esperanza and the Corita Art Center, the community puts their faith into action and carries on the spirit of former IHM sisters such as Anita Caspary, Helen Kelley, and Corita Kent. 

The Immaculate Heart Community’s history and present day advocacy efforts were featured in the 2021 documentary Rebel Hearts. You can find out more information on the community’s website.